The Heavenly Demon sat cross-legged on the floor of the wooden shack, her eyes closed, her breathing steady.
She began circulating her energy according to the method she had created.
The qi moved through her body slowly at first, following the pathways she had mapped out.
She stabilized the circulation, ensuring every thread of energy was in its proper place.
Then she began the hard part.
Transformation.
The qi shifted and began fluctuating violently. Reshaping and reconstructing her body.
Pain erupted through her body.
Every inch of her vessel was being torn apart and rebuilt simultaneously. Muscles twisted. Bones cracked and reformed. Organs shifted positions, optimizing themselves according to her design.
The pain was almost unbearable, but she didn’t make a sound.
Then the pain intensified even more as the qi reached her meridians and qi pathways.
This was a whole other level of agony. It felt like having every nerve in her body set on fire while being struck by lightning at the same time.
Her qi pathways screamed as they were forcibly widened, refined, and restructured.
Still, she remained steady.
She was the Heavenly Demon.
This level of pain was nothing.
The qi continued its work, moving beneath her skin like thousands of crawling insects. Her insides rearranged themselves - intestines shifting, her heart adjusting its position slightly, new structures forming where none had existed before.
Her skin began to rupture.
Cracks appeared across her arms and face, showing slivers of the qi underneath.
Blood seeped from the wounds, only to be reabsorbed moments later as the reconstruction continued.
She held on.
Hours passed.
The qi churned relentlessly. Breaking. Building. Refining.
More ruptures. More pain. More reconstruction.
She endured it all in silence.
...
Finally, it was complete.
The rummaging qi settled. And the newly formed patterns in her qi circulation circuits stabilized into their new configuration.
The Heavenly Demon opened her eyes.
She looked down at her hands.
They were different.
While the body remained relatively the same in appearance, it had... matured. It didn’t look as youthful and soft as before but more elegant and refined.
She looked like herself again.
Like the Heavenly Demon.
At that moment, a notification appeared before her:
[Congratulations! Heavenly Demonic Sword Art (Unique) has advanced to Heavenly Demonic Sword Art (Ultimate)]
She looked at the skill.
"Still referring to me as a skill," she scoffed. "Hmph."
She dismissed the notification with a wave of her hand.
Then she raised her palm and examined it closely.
With her eyes, she could see it - the ambient qi in the air, gathering around her hand and swirling toward her.
She tried absorbing it.
The qi flowed into her body effortlessly, filling her reserves that were almost completely empty after the transformation.
"It’s a success," she thought.
She spread qi through her body, carefully examining her new condition.
The body was perfect.
No - better than perfect. It was even superior to her previous body in certain ways.
Not in raw strength, of course. Her original form had been cultivated over centuries to reach the peak of power.
But precisely because this body had started weaker, she had been able to mold it with far greater precision. Every meridian was optimized. Every pathway was refined. Every organ was positioned exactly where it needed to be.
If she were to reach the Mahayana Realm with this body, she would be even stronger than her previous perfect self for sure.
Speaking of realms...
She turned her perception inward, assessing her current cultivation level.
Origin Realm.
That corresponded to SS-rank in the system’s terms.
But something stumped her.
Why couldn’t she enter the Soul Formation Realm directly?
After all, Soul Formation was mostly an understanding realm rather than a physical one. It was about comprehending the nature of the soul, tracing the connection from the body to the origin.
She already had that understanding. She had achieved Soul Formation in her previous life. The knowledge was still there.
So why didn’t it work?
After some thought, she realized the problem.
She still had yet to recreate her mind realm.
Although she had regained most of the mind realm’s functionality after the advancement - accelerated thought processing, the ability to use divine sense freely - she still couldn’t access her own spiritual sea.
She glanced at Cipher’s motionless body.
It seemed their link was quite deep.
Unless she was completely detached from him, she couldn’t develop a mind realm of her own. His spiritual sea was her spiritual sea.
She looked at him for a long moment.
He was already dead, yet she was still connected.
This thing was really troublesome.
She sighed.
"Well, no matter."
She rose to her feet and did a few basic movements to test her new body.
For now, she needed to find a way to bring him back.
And she thought she had finally understood what he meant when he said he had a plan.
...
A while later.
Maya drifted down from the sky, her feet touching the ground unsteadily. She clutched her head, wincing as a sharp pain lanced through her skull.
"It happened again," she thought.
She wondered what was going on with her.
These sudden blackouts kept occurring. One moment she would be flying in a certain direction, and the next she would find herself somewhere completely different with no memory of how she got there.
Just vague recollections.
She looked at her system screen.
She had leveled up again.
Was she losing her mind?
Every time she blacked out, she gained levels. She hoped she wasn’t going around slaughtering innocents while unconscious.
She wondered if she was losing control like Dante.
She observed her skills carefully, scanning through the list.
Although she was surprised by the changes - the evolution of her species to Demi-God, her class advancing to Saintess, the rise of the Timeless skill to Transcendent rank and the name change, and even other skill advancements she didn’t remember earning - she didn’t see any problematic skill that could have caused the blackouts.
It didn’t make sense.
As she stood there, lost in thought, she heard the sounds of battle.
She began moving toward the source of the sound.
She pushed through undergrowth and ducked beneath low-hanging branches, the sounds growing louder with each step.
Finally, she emerged into a clearing.
Two figures were locked in combat. A man and a woman.
The man had bright crimson hair and a protruding horn on his forehead. No matter how you looked at it, he was definitely the bad guy here. The woman was mostly on the defensive, barely managing to deflect his strikes.
Maya’s eyes seemed to lose focus for a moment.
"Cipher..." she muttered.
Then she shook her head.
No. That wasn’t Cipher.
The way she moved had some resemblance. But it definitely wasn’t him.
That being said, she didn’t seem to be in the best of situations. Her movements were growing sluggish, her defenses faltering. Blood dripped from a wound on her arm.
She decided to help.